David Schweikert: “I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Brady) for yielding. I may come to the microphone with a slightly different…”

“I thank the gentleman from Texas (Mr. Brady) for yielding. I may come to the microphone with a slightly different message, having been on the bipartisan multiemployer pension commission, having hundreds of staff-hours into digging into the numbers and desperately trying to come up with an honest, holistic, complete solution. I fear we are about to do a level of violence here financially that we don't mean to. A previous Democrat speaker in the previous testimony actually spoke about we need to do a lifeboat. If you do the math here, we are not doing a lifeboat. We are putting a little life preserver out when we need a big lifeboat. And the math-- let's be honest about the math. If we actually come here, and I know this chart is too small to read, but I brought it up because we have all seen the actuarial report that makes it very clear. If we actually use anything even close to what a union worker for a single employer plan--the protection, the rate of return, the net present value calculations they get--if we do that to these multiemployers, the vast majority of the multiemployer plans are in the red. And we are, right now, about to fix an offer--whether you want to call it a bailout, whether you want to call it a subsidy, it is really expensive, and we are only taking care of a small portion of the problem. What are we about to do to all the others, saying: Well, you were close to the cutoff; you are on your own?…”